I am reminded of an old story about explorers. Sometimes it is told about Columbus and Native Americans, sometimes it is told about Captain Cook and Australian Aboriginals. Basically it boils down to the explorer saying “I have discovered this wonderful new land and I think I will call it America/Australia”. The native replies with something along the lines of “What do you mean discovered, we have known it was here all along”.
From the perspective of most divers, Dominica is undiscovered. It is not as if diving in Dominica is primitive, there are a number of fully equipped and well organised dive centres catering for a moderate flow of tourist divers. It is just that most of us never really noticed it was there.
A confusion of names with the Dominican Republic is no doubt partly to blame, so lets get this straight. Dominica is a small mountainous member of the Windward Islands of the Caribbean and has nothing to do with the Dominican Republic, a much larger Caribbean state that shares an island with Haiti. How many divers have come close to discovering this magic little island only to be distracted by a confusion of names?
Visibility is slightly less than I would expect for a tropical dive, but when I see the richness of the marine life this is easily forgiven. If it was not for the nutrients washing into the sea from Dominica's many rivers there would be nothing to differentiate the island's reefs from so many other Caribbean locations. In-between the corals and sponges every nook and cranny is host to interesting macro life. Shrimps and arrow crabs are everywhere. Feather stars and bristle worms crawl over the sponges. I am reminded of Papua New Guinea.
There are none of the limestone ridges, grooves and spurs normally associated with coral reefs. The underlying rock structure is volcanic. Tumbled piles of giant boulders, craggy buttresses and overhanging ledges. All the usual corals are there in well-known shapes and sizes, but in addition the richness of the water maintains a gorgeous array of sponges in colours ranging from grey to orange to bright yellow.
At the south of the island is the Soufrière Marine Reserve. Here there are walls that extend from the cliff tops straight down below the water for hundreds of metres into the flooded crater.
On the outside of the bay submerged ridges and pinnacles projecting from the sunken part of the crater rim approach the surface. These provide some truly spectacular dive sites, with imaginative names like Dangleben's Pinnacles, a series of five pinnacles ranging in depths from 12 metre to 25 metres covered in corals and sponges.
The marine life is more of the same in the best possible way: denser, bigger, more colourful and more spectacular. I can honestly say that Dangleben's Pinnacles is the best reef dive I have yet experienced in the Caribbean. I don't know which local diver originally said it, but the quote is “If you're tired of Dangleben's, you're tired of life” and I can easily agree with that. If I dived here often enough I might even get to see a frogfish.